Campaign giving rules must be fixed

President Barack Obama, Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, who used to work for Obama in the White House, and it seems like just about everyone else have blamed the Supreme Court for the rulings that opened up our political system to unlimited, unreported contributions to super PACs by corporations, unions and wealthy individuals.

That’s not the entire story, however.

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Ten years ago, when Congress was considering the McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform legislation, a handful of Congress members — including Rep. Tom Davis, a Virginia Republican, and me — tried to warn our colleagues that they were opening Pandora’s box. But they refused to listen.

I was then-chairman of the House Democratic Caucus and Davis was chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee. But still, we didn’t prevail.

Common Cause was leading the drive for campaign finance reform, with help from the editorial pages of The New York Times and The Washington Post.

The reasoning went something like this: There is too much money in our political system, so we need to change the law to outlaw “soft money” contributions to the two major political parties. Soft money was defined as corporate funds, union dues money and large contributions from individuals. Both the national Democratic and Republican parties and their respective congressional campaign committees could accept soft money — but only for certain purposes, and all contributions were fully reportable.

The reformers argued that this sea of soft money was corrupting the political process.

Those of us who questioned their efforts argued that it was better to have this money go directly to the two political parties rather than spent by outside groups that were not responsible to the parties. We further argued that the parties tend to be centering forces in our political system — and our system worked because contributions had to be fully reportable.